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CRM 2011 Dialogs: Preventing Users from Going Back With Child Dialogs

Post Author: Joe D365 |

If you are building a dialog for CRM 2011 and need to have it trigger an email or create a record or do some other action (like case resolution), you should be aware that the Previous button can pose a problem.

child dialogs

As best practice, you want to do everything you can to put any automatic actions in your dialogs at the very end. However, sometimes you can't get around putting the action somewhere in the middle of your process, and that's where you can get into trouble with your users going backwards through your dialogs.

Any time during your dialog, users can hit Previous and have it go backwards a step. This will cause a problem if the following three things happen:

  1. The dialog did something when your user hit Next
  2. Your user hits Previous
  3. Your user hits Next again and retriggers the action that the dialog already completed.

In order to prevent this, you can use child dialogs to break your dialog into two pieces and disable the ability to go backwards from the second dialog to the first. To do this, make sure that after your action (such as Send Email or Create Record), you use the Link Child Dialog step to have your dialog call a child dialog to finish its process.

CRM 2011 Dialogs: Preventing Users from Going Back With Child Dialogs

If you do this, as soon as your first dialog calls the child dialog, the user will be unable to hit the Previous button and go backwards. This means they won't be able to retrigger the automatic action they have already fired off.

CRM 2011 Dialogs: Preventing Users from Going Back With Child Dialogs

That's it! A quick and simple tip to prevent some potential issues with dialogs in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Happy CRM'ing!

Joe CRM
By Joe D365
Joe D365 is a Microsoft Dynamics 365 superhero who runs on pure Dynamics adrenaline. As the face of PowerObjects, Joe D365’s mission is to reveal innovative ways to use Dynamics 365 and bring the application to more businesses and organizations around the world.

8 comments on “CRM 2011 Dialogs: Preventing Users from Going Back With Child Dialogs”

  1. It does somehow mitigate the problem, but even if you do it that way, when the child dialog finishes, you still have the option to go back by pressing the previous button. The window you get is: "This is the end of the dialog. Click finish to close it." And you get 5 buttons at the button, including the previous, which really sucks!

  2. when I go with above solution I get : "Some of the content has been changed in my dialog" this become weird user experience

    1. Hi - We have seen users reporting this too but can't replicate in our 2016 test org. What version of crm do you have? Online or on premises ?

    1. Hi - We can't hide this in an SDK approved manner. But we agree it would be a nice flexibility to have.

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